Libraries: A Must-have for Design

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

Feinberg: A lot is going on in this industry, and there are tremendous advances with everything. What has been happening with SnapEDA in the last six to eight months? What are the things you’d like people to know about most?

Baker: The big news is that we’ve hit one million unique engineers that use SnapEDA each year to speed up their designs. Since SnapEDA works with nearly every PCB design tool. It gives engineers an instant productivity boost without them needing to switch tools.

Other than that, we’ve been working with many new component vendors, which means that we’ve been launching tons of new PCB footprints, symbols, and 3D models on SnapEDA. We’ve also soft-launched a new integration with a large distributor this year to allow engineers to download SnapEDA models right from their website. We continue to listen to users and ship new features and improvements every day.

Feinberg: That’s good. I can just tell by your expression and demeanor that you’re excited about some of the things that are happening.

Baker: Definitely.

Feinberg: This spring, one of our upcoming magazine themes is going to be “everything starts with design.” You made a comment that I agreed with. Your indication was that when you started the company, it started with an idea. You’re saying that when companies have an idea, then they go to design.

Baker: Absolutely. What makes me so passionate about what we do is that every design starts with an idea and the desire to bring something useful into the world. It’s easy to lose sight of that when, as engineers, we’re so focused on the design process. A lot of what we’re doing at SnapEDA is enabling people to bring those ideas to life more quickly. We help engineers iterate more quickly, and realize their ideas much faster so that they can spend more time on coming up with new ideas, innovating, and optimizing their designs. Ultimately, this means that more and better ideas are brought into the world, helping to increase the rate of innovation.

Feinberg: You mentioned earlier that when you have an idea, it goes to design, and design is the jumping off point. I also loved your comment that libraries get no glory. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Baker: Yes. I think it all comes back to where the value is. Ultimately, the value of an idea is what the end product accomplishes. The value is not in the product or the design itself, and it’s certainly not in the library. It’s in making something that does something useful.

These days, a custom PCB is not always required because there are so many ways to accomplish ideas using off-the-shelf technology. However, once that solution needs to scale, a custom PCB is needed to reduce costs or achieve different form factors.

Entrepreneurs understand this principle very well because they need to—they’re working with fixed runways. I’ve seen so many startups that built casings around a Raspberry Pi or Arduino in the early phases of their companies and sold their initial products like that. Only once they proved out the concept did they build out custom PCBs to shrink the size of their product and reduce costs or make other improvements.

The point is the further you get away from the value that this idea brings into the world, the less value people see in it intrinsically, and that’s just natural. But it means that even among electronics designers, the glamour is placed on the design instead of the libraries.

But that’s risky because libraries are a fundamental gating factor in the design process. Bad libraries can cause delays in the design process, and unnecessary prototype iterations that add further delays and cost. Requiring engineers to make every library from scratch is also completely inefficient, especially when that eats up days of time and when other engineers around the world have already done that same work. Further, libraries require a particular skill set that is completely distinct from design work. Engineers need to know to look for common “gotchas,” like mirrored components in datasheets, and that only comes from having the keen eye of analyzing these datasheets every day, all day. It’s not easy work, especially for complex connectors.

Of course, big companies have always known this. They have dedicated PCB librarians on staff to ensure the quality of their designs, and to operate more efficiently. This makes sense since large companies can afford to compartmentalize roles, and generally, are more focused on de-risking projects and optimizing yield.

But design teams are getting smaller, and more smaller companies are emerging, building electronics. And that usually means their budgets smaller. Many of these companies can’t afford librarians and fall prey to the fallacy that libraries aren’t of value. It isn’t until they spend thousands of dollars in hours creating a footprint from scratch, or until they make an error on a footprint. Then, they have to spend weeks on reworking a board or thousands of dollars on new boards. But even then, the human brain will still struggle with attributing value to the libraries because they’re just so far removed from the end result. It’s a bit of a conundrum.

Feinberg: Are the designers your customers?

Baker: Yes. Although our platform is free, we have a very popular service called InstaPart where designers can request any symbol and footprint and get it in 24 hours. Our service supports Altium, Eagle, OrCad, Allegro, Mentor PADS and DXDesigner, KiCad, PCB123, CircuitMaker, and SolidWorks PCB.

Feinberg: It seems suppliers’ practices are changing. For example, I was at the AltiumLive event last summer talking with some designers, and as an ex-supplier to the fabricators, we wished that the fabricators would come and talk to the suppliers when they needed something. One of the things I asked some designers at the AltiumLive event was if they were starting to talk to suppliers about what they needed. You may be surprised by things you don’t think are available.

One time, I had a big customer come to us and say, “I wish we could do this,” and we said, “We can do that.” They asked, “What product would do that?” I responded, “We haven’t brought it out because we haven’t seen a need for it.” They had wished they’d know because they had to design around a weakness in the products that were available to them. They also asked if we could make it for them and why we didn’t talk to them more often. So, how do you see design best practices changing?

Baker: Let’s start with the communication between engineers, vendors, suppliers, and I’ll give you a little story. We have a huge community of engineers—over a million users on our platform—and we receive thousands of emails and chat support inquiries each month where people ask questions about our data or suppliers’ parts. But we only receive one or two phone calls every week or two, and we have a 1-800 number where anyone in the world can call.

I bring that up because engineers want information and they want to give feedback. But they don’t want to pick up the phone to get it. The internet is enabling more communication between all these parties because people can contact a company online through text-based channels. For example, a lot of companies have chat bots now or live chat.

The trend that we’re seeing in the design world is that engineers want self-serve information. Sometimes, we as engineers don’t feel like talking to human beings. Instead, we want to get the information ourselves quickly and efficiently, or we want to communicate via asynchronous channels because it’s more efficient and we can keep doing things while we’re waiting for a response. Believe me, if you give engineers the opportunity to ask questions or provide feedback via text-based channels, they will be very vocal. We’re not shy about things we believe should exist.

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